Religion Journal;Old Issues Arise in a Hearing on a Heresy Charge

By GUSTAV NIEBUHR

Published: March 2, 1996

When nine Episcopal bishops convened last Tuesday as a rare ecclesiastical court, they met at an almost disarmingly attractive site, the Cathedral of St. John in Wilmington, Del., a gray granite building with wood-paneled hallways and a peaceful meditation garden.

But the graciousness of the surroundings belied the seriousness of the proceedings. The bishops were there to hear arguments as to whether legal grounds existed to try Walter S. Righter, a 73-year-old retired Bishop, on a charge of heresy, the grounds for which were his signing a statement favoring the ordination of noncelibate homosexuals and his ordination of a gay man as a deacon.

Since last August, when 10 bishops who accused Bishop Righter collected enough signatures from among their peers to charge him formally, the word "heresy" has rung harshly in the ears of many Episcopalians. During a break in Tuesday's hearing, one man remarked that it seemed to be a relic of medieval times.

He could hardly be faulted for making that association. It was in 1208, midway through the Middle Ages, that Pope Innocent III proclaimed one of the most enduringly famous heretic hunts of all time, the Albigensian Crusade. The campaign was against the Cathars, a Christian sect that taught the existence of two gods -- one good, with whom humans should seek to be united, the other evil and in control of the material world. The sect had displaced the Roman Catholic Church in southern France, nullifying the Vatican's authority there.

To restore the status quo, the Pope offered an economic incentive. "The church reserved to itself the right to redistribute among the more faithful crusaders the confiscated lands of the defeated heretics," the British writer Paul Johnson said in his "History of Christianity" (Wiedenfeld & Nicholson, 1976). "Thus, the crusade attracted the most disreputable elements in northern France, and the result was horror."

The violence lasted 10 years; in one French city, crusaders killed 15,000 people. But the history of how the church has responded to theological challenge cannot be dismissed as a tale of excess. At times, heresy has played a useful role, in terms of clarifying church teachings.

In Christianity's first centuries, long and often rancorous debates among theologians -- some of whom wound up being tagged as heretics -- helped the church define its dogma, elaborating just what it meant to be a Christian. In sorting out what they considered to be truth from error, early church leaders were able to decide, among other things, what writings ought to be included in the New Testament, as well as how to describe Christ's nature, as fully human and divine.

But in Christianity's second millennium, with the heavy hand of secular power often on their side, religious authorities sometimes branded as heretics the very people whom later generations would esteem as exemplars of the faith.

Take the religious dissident Roger Williams, who was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony by its Puritan leaders. He moved south and in 1636 founded the colony of Rhode Island, which soon became a haven of religious tolerance. By the next century, Williams's reputation as a voice for religious and political freedom was beginning to soar.

"It often takes about 100 years for a heretic to become a hero," said James Dunn, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, a religious liberties lobbying organization based in Washington. "Most heresies," Mr. Dunn added, "are time-bound."

But in their time, challenges to tradition can seem dangerous.

More than three decades ago, Joseph C. Hough, then a young assistant minister at a Virginia church, was warned that he and the senior pastor threatened the congregation's unity by proposing that blacks be allowed to join the congregation.

Dr. Hough, now dean of the divinity school at Vanderbilt University, said that after a majority of the deacons voted against integration, he left and went to graduate school. No one, in his recollection, used the word "heresy" in that case, but the experience helped shape his attitude about how to handle radically dissenting opinions.

"I think the way to engage questions that are controversial in the church is not to silence controversy, but to argue it," Dr. Hough said in a recent interview. One thing he would vehemently argue against is an appeal to racism, he said.

"I personally have come to the conclusion that there are some things that are not appropriate in the church," he said. "But I don't think the answer is to throw people out of the church, but to confront them."